True Detective: Night Country: We Really Need to Talk About Anders Lund

I’m desperate to prove that the forces driving True Detective: Night Country’s story aren’t supernatural. Throughout the three episodes we’ve seen so far, I’ve pointed to Ennis’s isolated living conditions, the darkness, its residents’ lack of sleep, and the town’s clearly-the-wrong-color drinking water. I stand with Detective Danvers (Jodie Foster)! There can’t possibly be some “voodoo E.T. cosmic coompa loompa bullshit” going on in Ennis, right?! Then, at the end of Sunday night’s epsiode, a guy jolts out of his hospital bed and yells some nightmare-inducing words to one of our detectives. Can’t really explain that one away, huh?

That man is Andrew Lund, one of the Tsalal scientists who was found in the human “corpsicle.” He’s the one who screams when an Ennis cop accidentally snaps off his arm in episode 2. One of those scientists actually surviving? It was such a strange concept that I blocked it out of my memory—but the series does continually show Danvers calling the hospital and asking for updates on his condition. When Navarro and Danvers finally visit him in episode 3, he’s convulsing and missing most of his limbs due to frostbite.

Danvers leans in and asks some important questions, starting with, you know, what happened out there? “We woke her, and now she’s out in the ice,” Lund responds, echoing the “she’s awake” comments made by the Tsalal scientists in episode 1. After a scuffle breaks out out in the hospital lobby, he’s left alone with Detective Navarro (Kali Reis). That’s when he sits up and says, “Hello, Evangeline,” like he’s The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil. He then points at her, continuing, “Your mother says hello. She’s waiting for you.” A quick refresher: this episode also told us that her mother ran into the wilderness one day and was mysteriously killed. Ennis is bad news, people.

Let’s break down some theories about just what the hell happened in episode 3’s closing moments.

HBOTrue Detective seems as stumped as the rest of us right now.

How is Lund Alive?”I thought that it’s very weird that nobody in this True-Detective universe seems to ask how it’s possible that Anders Lund survived being frozen into a corpsicle and how the corpsicle sculpture was possible in the first place!” one Reddit user asked on the r/TrueDetective forum. “Dead people cannot remain in these contorted positions during the freezing process—unless they were killed by getting shock frozen within a few seconds. And that is science fiction!”

Well, the Tsalal scientists were researching cellular regeneration, right? If they found this fictional miracle substance deep in the ice, it’s possible that the group was experimenting on themselves to disastrous effects. Another commenter wrote, “Maybe the killer ‘marked’ Lund with the spiral as part of the regeneration experiment?” The whiteboard at the Tsalal station also reads, “We Are All Dead.” Maybe the scientists realized that the drug wasn’t the savior they thought it was—and it would soon backfire.

OK, But How Does He Know All About Detective Navarro?”Ange had to have hallucinated Lund sitting up and talking, but I am also open to maybe a supernatural entity,” one Reddit commenter suggested. “The world is an old girl, and there are things in her closet.” Sure, but what if we’re looking for some real reasons here? This is someone she never met before who is saying her name and mentioning her dead mother. That’s a little too familiar!

“Please explain how a ghost leading a woman to the bodies is realistic,” another fan asked. Hold on! One supernatural thing at a time, please. It’s tough to stay focused on proving what is or isn’t real. Hopefully, the messed-up water is just making everyone hallucinate. “There’s a lot of speculation that it’ll turn out the water is poisoned which is causing hallucinations,” one fan wrote. “Ghost found the bodies,” another replied.

Fine. It’s true… a ghost found the bodies. But maybe the Travis Cohle ghost was a hallucination as well? Even Danvers seems to be tripping out. Remember, a hand reaches over to her in bed and says, “she’s awake.” The only logical solution so far is that the water is making everyone hallucinate. Or, maybe we should just succumb to the hordes of fans on Reddit who comment, “ghost found the bodies” whenever someone says the series won’t go full supernatural on us. Give me a couple more episodes to figure this one out.